


Lacuna

by ghiblitears



Series: what we missed in space we'll make up for on earth [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Series, Vacation, keith's cabin of angst, they're back on earth and have some feelings to sort out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 13:20:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10720113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghiblitears/pseuds/ghiblitears
Summary: Post-series end, Keith and Lance take a vacation. Keith still needs a reality check every morning. Lance tries to wake some old ghosts.





	Lacuna

Being back at the cabin gives Keith mixed feelings. On one hand, it's the closest thing he's got left of a home on this planet. On the other hand, he hasn't felt the same about the place since his hellish mind trip through it years ago. Keith feels like he could turn around at any minute and see his father's ghost.

  
He doesn't. The only other soul in the cabin is Lance, sprawled out over on his beat-up sofa and flipping through an old Garrison pilot manual. He looks so at ease that it’s almost annoying. It’s not fair that he gets to take their return to Earth in stride, not when Keith is still reeling from the aftermath.

  
"Do you think they'd let us back into the Garrison?" Lance pipes up. He doesn't look up from the manual. "To pilot? I mean, we never passed any of the final exams. But flying a giant space lion has to count for something, right?"

  
"Unless they decide to wipe my permanent record, I kinda doubt it," Keith points out.

  
Lance makes a dismissive noise. "Water under the bridge."

  
"Iverson won’t see it that way." He joins Lance on the couch. It creaks under their combined weight and Keith changes his position, trying to even the distribution. There’s a full seat cushion available between them, but Lance decides to claim it by laying all the way across, leaving his feet dangling off the end of the couch. The top of his head rests against Keith’s leg.

  
“Au contraire,” Lance still doesn’t look up from the manual, but raises his arm and jabs his index finger right by Keith’s nose. He swats it away. “He’d be impressed with our teamwork. The last time he saw us was that epically failed rescue simulation.”

  
“Actually, the last time he saw me he was expelling me for insubordination.”

  
“Listen, I’m going to milk this ‘saving-the-universe’ thing for all it’s worth. I’ll get us back in the loop.”

  
Keith leans back against the couch. Through the dirty window, he can see the sun’s blinding rays beating down on the desert. The uniform landscape crawls out towards the horizon, streaks of the beige dirt turned red from the heat. He tries to stare at it instead of at Lance, who’s being illuminated in a way that makes him almost look like an actual fucking ray of sunshine. In the light he can see the subtle changes in his friend’s face; the more defined jaw, the way his hair’s grown out so it’s slightly longer on top than it is on the sides. The blue eyes that scan the pilot manual haven’t changed.

  
“I don’t know if I want to be back in the loop,” Keith admits.

  
Lance finally tears his attention from the diagrams. He raises one eyebrow nearly to his hairline as he looks back at Keith. “What do you mean?”

  
He pulls his knees up to his chin and crosses his arms over them. “It’s weird enough being back here. It’s weirder knowing that no one else will understand what we went through.”

  
“Emo kid.” Lance, being Lance, can’t help but joke at his expense. He puts the pilot book down on the side table, on top of a stack of old papers.

  
“You think things will just go back to the way they were?” Keith asks.

  
“Hey, I tried to make it work.” Lance sits up to mirror him and pulls more into himself. He looks smaller. His quietness is almost deafening when compared to his usual boisterous self.

  
The disconnection between the team seemed huge after spending years trapped together on the same castle-ship. He’d had minimal contact with everyone, which hadn’t been too much of a shock given his actions after they’d landed on Earth. Lance had gone home to his family immediately after returning, and Keith had done what he did best; escaped. So it surprised him when Lance had reached out to him personally to ask for a vacation out of the limelight. If there was anything he knew about Lance it was that he wanted to be in the limelight and as far out of his shadow as possible. It surprised him more that _he_ agreed to do it.

  
“I know they were trying to help,” Lance continues. “and they did, for a while. But you’re right, no one understands.”

  
Keith leans back further against the couch, tilts his head back until he’s staring at the ceiling. The cabin’s support beams cross in uniform lines. He stares at them until he can feel his head stop swimming.

  
They stay side-by-side in comfortable silence for some time. At one point Lance curls up at the end of the couch— still jetlagged from the early flight from Cuba — and falls dead asleep, hugging a pillow and snoring gently. Keith’s tempted to take a photo and send it to the rest of the team, but that would blow their cover and he’s kind of appreciative of the privacy for now.

  
Instead, he entertains the idea of dismantling his old evidence wall. All the clues and signs that had lead to the discovery of the Blue Lion still decorated the corkboard, photos and sketches and maps making a confusing eyesore. Keith grabs the edge of one photograph; a print showing the mouth of the cave that held Lance’s lion. The photo’s faded thanks to years in the sunlight, and dusty beneath his fingertips. He recalls just how many times he walked through that cave, how many times his hand grazed the markings on the walls, how many times he didn’t find what he was looking for.

  
He looks back at Lance, still caught in the throes of sleep.

 

***

  
Lance wakes an hour or so later with a dry mouth and a thirst for adventure.

  
He forgets where he is for a minute until he opens his eyes and sees the crisscross of wooden beams above him. The arid air makes the cabin seem impossibly still.

  
He sits upright on the couch and rubs at his eyes. The sun isn’t kind to them, and he’s forced to squint as he looks around the room. It’s as messy as it was when Team Voltron had left it, although he can pick out some new details from Keith’s return to the desert some months ago — books stacked on every available surface, papers with unfinished drawings in piles on the table in the corner, abandoned half-drunk cups of coffee scattered around. A low hum fills the room from the electronic equipment in the corner. The weird photo wall stares him in the face on the opposite wall, one print hanging partially off the corkboard. Keith himself is nowhere to be found.

  
Lance stands and stretches, limbs still heavy with sleep. He rolls his shoulders and groans at the dull ache that rests squarely on them — the couch is no replacement for a proper bed. He’d better not be stuck with it for the entirety of this trip or he’s going to be pissed.

  
“Mullet?” He calls, and gets no answer.

  
Some kind of mechanical whirring emanates from his right, outside the front door, and Lance exits the house to see Keith partially hidden underneath his hoverbike, with only his legs sticking out as he hacks away at its undercarriage. Several tools are scattered within arms’ reach.

  
“If you inhale enough engine fumes your brain’ll turn to goo. Just sayin’.” He kicks Keith’s outstretched foot by way of greeting.

  
“Is that what happened to you?” His voice is muffled.

  
Lance rolls his eyes. “Ha ha, you’re hilarious.”

  
He finally moves out from underneath the bike and winces when the bright sunlight assaults his eyes. He’s absolutely filthy, covered head-to-toe in dust from laying on the ground and oil from the machinery. A black smudge of grease runs across the bridge of his nose. Keith tosses the tool he was using onto the ground and sits up, still squinting in a way that Lance refuses to find endearing. “Did you need something or did you come out here to make fun of me?”

  
“Nah, I just got bored.” He points at the hoverbike. “That’s not the one we rode to the cave, is it?”

  
“Parts of it,” Keith replies. He swipes a hand over his sweaty forehead, which only results in him smearing more grease on his face. “The dust storms killed it. I had to take out all the machinery and rebuild the frame from scratch.”

  
“Cool,” Lance says. “Can we go somewhere?”

  
Judging by the surprise that pops up on his face, that hadn’t been the response Keith had been expecting. “You just want to go out into the desert?”

  
He offers Keith his hand, which he takes after a moment of hesitation. “I have a place in mind.”

  
***

  
Standing before the mouth of the cave suddenly makes Lance feel very, very small.

  
He feels like he should be over it, that after several years in space he shouldn't be fazed by things like this. He’s faced down fleets of Galra battleships, sentries engineered specifically to kill him, and several diplomatic emergencies involving arranged marriage, but being back on Earth still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The dust kicks up in a sudden wind and skitters across the ground into the cave's maw. Sunlight bakes the earth beneath his feet.

  
Keith leaps down the rock face and makes his way towards Lance. Their ride to the cave had been uneventful, but he had steadfastly refused to drive the hover bike anything less than maximum speed, leaving Lance jelly-legged and unsteady.

  
"You okay?" Keith shoots him a sideways glance.

  
Lance realizes he's zoning out and shakes his head to clear it. "Yeah, I'm fine." He stares upward, to the very top of the cave's entrance. The adrenaline must still be wigging him out. "Lil' bit of deja-vu."

  
They enter.

  
The cave's almost as he remembers it, narrow and winding and quiet aside from the sound of dripping water. It snakes farther down than they can see, down a path they hadn’t been able to take in their first (and last) visit. There's a new skylight, cleaved through the rock where Lance had flown Blue out of the cavern below. And something else is missing...

  
“Why’s the hole in the floor gone?” Lance asks.

  
Keith stares down at the ground with an almost comically serious expression. “I don’t actually know. I hadn’t even thought about it the last time I came here.”

  
He’s surprised. “You’ve been back already?”

  
"Once or twice." Keith replies. He lags behind, staring up into the hole in the ceiling. He raises one pale arm up to his eyes to shield them from the sun's piercing rays. "Just to convince myself that I hadn't dreamed the past couple of years up."

  
"With your limited imagination I doubt that's possible." Lance catches Keith's glare and holds his hands up in a 'sorry' gesture. "Kidding."

  
They continue their walk through the cave until they've reached the main chamber, just slightly further than where they'd reached before. The sunlight doesn’t reach this far — they end up having to navigate the cavern with a dim flashlight that Keith had the insight to grab before they left. This room is decked out in lion carvings, ones he hasn't seen before, each wall becoming a fresco of pictures detailing the exploits of Blue. The air grows colder with every step he takes into the cave.

  
“You know what’s weird?” Lance asks.

  
Keith pauses in front of one carving, depicting the Blue Lion surrounded by smaller, human-like figures. Five stand at attention at the lion’s base, arms raised in what looks like celebration. He traces it gently and something in Lance's chest catches at the sight. “What?”

  
“There’s no energy here anymore,” he says. “Feels like something’s missing.”

  
“Something _is_ missing, Lance,” Keith replies.

  
“Thanks, Captain Obvious,” he says, and can almost feel the dagger of Keith’s glare rather than see it. He crosses the room and stands before the largest carving - Blue standing tall, a beacon of light and hope. Etched shooting stars draw the focus into her, pulling his gaze inward and up. The mural is huge enough to dwarf the entire wall. The flashlight’s beam dances over it. Lance reaches for the carving and feels small.

  
His fingertips brush grit and stone, cold to the touch and slightly damp from the cave's water. He half-expects a shock, for blue light to illuminate the room the way it happened the first time, for him to feel the familiar pull of connection to his lion. The memory hums in his mind, still crystal clear even after all these years. Instead the wall stays maddeningly silent.

  
It hurts.

  
He doesn't realize how empty the gesture makes him feel until he's back in reality; unscrewed from the grand vision he'd had about coming back here. This was his origin story; it was supposed to be his _moment_. Instead he gets nothing.

  
Lance lowers his head and tries to suppress the emotions rising inside him.

  
"Lance?"

  
It's Keith, but without any of his usual brashness or stoicism. He sounds surprised — dare he say, concerned — at Lance's behaviour. A shuffle of footsteps brings him closer. "What are you—"

  
He’s promptly horrified when he feels tears begin to prick at his eyes. He’d pushed this down for too long, the longing to reconnect with Blue and Voltron, to have someone else encouraging him every step of the way, to not feel so alone in his own head, and now it’s all coming to the surface. He swipes a hand across his eyes.

  
“Are you okay?”

  
Lance can see Keith hovering just outside of his blurry vision and embarrassment floods through him. He’s stuck in a cave in the desert, crying over a weird mystical bond with a space lion now at the edge of the universe, in front of his rival. Not part of the plan.

  
“Sorry,” he manages. He’s eggshell fine, teetering steadily between being in control and just fucking losing it. “I—“

  
He stops himself when he feels pressure settle across his shoulders, and it takes Lance a second to realize that Keith has him in a half-assed hug, one of his arms thrown over Lance’s lanky frame. He’s acutely aware of their proximity, more so than he’d been on the hoverbike; Keith’s dark hair brushes against the side of his head, his breath ghosting over Lance’s skin. It’s when he gives Lance’s shoulders a gentle squeeze that something releases inside him, and he buries his head in his hands and cries.

 

***

 

They leave the cave not long after Lance’s outburst. Lance stays steadfastly calm, and Keith does his best to avoid bringing up what had happened at all costs. The only acknowledgement he gets is a quick ‘thanks’ after it’s over and done with.

  
Keith doesn’t blame him. Feelings suck.

  
The ride back to the cabin is uneventful in the worst way. He feels unsettled after seeing Lance in such a vulnerable state, that the most infuriatingly upbeat and cheerful person he knows can be so shaken. It’s not that he hadn’t had his share of weird reverse culture-shock moments; it’s just that he had them alone, without judgement, without anyone to look at his situation as an outsider. He doesn’t know whether that’s any better.

  
There’s nowhere to hide in the cabin, not when it has three and a half rooms at most and one of the is filled to the brim with junk, broken parts of machinery and some of his dad’s stuff he couldn’t bring himself to throw out. It’s a decent amount of space for one person and makes for a nice contrast against the memory of just how terrifyingly large the Castle of Lions was. Sometimes Keith can give himself a reality check by just counting the rooms. It’s less ideal when one of its occupants most likely wants to be left alone and he’s not surprised when Lance parks himself on the front steps instead of coming inside.

  
“I’ll be here. You know, inside. If you need anything.” Keith mentally smacks himself for sounding so lame. A true paragon of support.

  
He almost thinks that Lance hasn’t heard him by his lack of reaction, but then he nods once and Keith leaves him on the porch.

  
***

  
An hour or so later he notices the quiet, how the halcyon sun has settled on the horizon and warmed the landscape in hues of orange. Lance hasn’t moved, still drawn into himself, arms crossed over his knees and his head resting against them. He stares out into the desert.

  
“You remember the mission to that planet with all the farmland?” he asks without breaking his gaze when Keith sits down next to him.

  
“X-78 Eraz,” Keith recalls automatically, then flushes at the memory. “Please don’t bring that up. Shiro and I were picking feathers out of our suits for a solid week.”

  
Lance says nothing, but Keith catches the hint of a smile around his mouth. He holds out his right hand, displaying a thin curved line along his thumb. “That might be the wildest mission we’ve ever been on. I’ve still got battle scars.”

  
“Seconded only by the actual fall of the Galra empire.”

  
“No kidding.” He pulls his hand back and resumes his position. “Being chased by sentries through a cornfield? Classic.”

  
They’re quiet again, locked into comfortable silence.

  
“Sometimes it doesn’t even feel real. We actually did all that stuff. We actually saved the whole universe and only like, seven people aside from us know that. Isn’t that wild?”

  
As if those words don’t describe every single thought Keith's had since returning to Earth.

  
“I couldn’t even tell my family the whole thing. I didn’t want to scare them,” Lance continues.

  
“You’re lucky though,” Keith murmurs. “At least you had someone to go home to.”

  
He can practically feel Lance thinking, almost hear the gears turning in his head as he processes his words. They're no closer than they were before, shoulders still brushing, and he wonders if he's imagining just how present the space between him and Lance is.

  
"I lost my parents twice, and Shiro twice. Then I came back here and all you guys went back to your lives. It's like I'm meant to be alone."

  
The words hang in the air like smoke.

  
He didn’t mean to say it with such finality, but it changes the whole atmosphere. One instant they're apart and the next his mind short-circuits because Lance's mouth is on his, kissing him like it’s their last act in the end of the world. It gives him no time to react, not enough to process what's happening or why, but Keith gives into it. Lance brings his hand up to cup his jaw and it sends live wires alight across his skin.

  
Lance breaks the kiss first after a minute or two, leaving Keith staring back, wide-eyed and dizzy. Whether that's due to a lack of oxygen or to what's just happened, he can't be sure.  
"You aren’t alone," Lance says. He moves his hand to the back of Keith's neck, tangles it in his overlong hair, and knocks their foreheads together gently. Keith just closes his eyes and exhales shakily.

  
"Lance, I-"

  
"It's okay," he reassures, answering a question Keith hadn't even gotten the chance to ask.  
So Keith kisses him again. His hands drop to Lance's waist and he grabs a handful of his shirt, pulls him in closer. When they break apart he drops his head to rest on Lance's shoulder.

  
"I was so sure you hated me," he says.

  
"Hate you? No way." Lance has him in a loose embrace, one arm slung over Keith's back and the other curled around his waist. "I literally cried in your arms today. How could I hate you?"

  
"You’re always trying to one-up me."

  
"I was _showing off_. What did you want, a lighted sign pointing to my bed?"

  
Keith responds by socking him in the arm because of course that’s Lance’s version of genuine flirting. He dodges, laughing, and the sight of him flushed pink and still caught in the low glow on the horizon is enough to give him butterflies.

  
"You're an asshole," he replies, and leans in to kiss him again. He catches Lance smiling against his mouth and he nearly melts, warmth spreading from his chest all the way to his toes. “This isn’t why you came here, is it?”

  
“Maybe.” Lance pulls him in tighter.

  
“Knew you had an ulterior motive,” he says against Lance’s chest, and when he laughs it’s something Keith feels rather than hears.

***

When Keith wakes up the next morning he doesn’t quite know where he is. When he dares to crack his eyes open he’s flat on his back, staring up into the ceiling of the cabin, watching dust motes dance in the air above him. There’s an unfamiliar pressure across his chest and his back hurts from the terrible sofa bed (the thought of replacing it dances across his sleep-addled mind).

  
He looks down to see that Lance has wrapped around him like a vine. Their legs are tangled and Lance has his free arm slung over Keith’s abdomen as if to hold him in one place; the other one is curled underneath his back in a way that can’t be comfortable and is probably going to result in some pins and needles when he wakes up. His head rests neatly in the crook of Keith’s shoulder.

  
So last night _had_ happened. The sight of Lance curled up next to him and the warmth radiating off him is the best reality check he’s probably ever had. He’s used to waking up disconnected from his own existence, reaching underneath his pillow and pulling out his knife, using his mind to extend the blade to convince himself that the past few years were real.

  
Instead he reaches down and places his own hand over Lance’s where it rests over his stomach and twines their fingers together.

  
There are no ghosts here. The only other soul in the cabin is Lance, anchoring him to reality and soundly asleep at his side.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this fic! This is the first thing I've written for VLD and I hope I did it justice. I just wanted to see some dorks in love <3 thanks for reading!
> 
> You can find me on tumblr at either @espressopidge (my VLD sideblog) or @ghiblirey (my main). Please come scream at me about my space children.


End file.
